Turnout Among Younger Voters Is Up, Democratic Analytics Firm Finds

YOUTH WAVE. Younger voters are notoriously bad at showing up to vote, especially in midterm elections, but a new analysis of primary elections in 2018 suggests they are doing better this year.

TargetSmart, a Democratic political analytics firm, studied 2018 primary elections in 24 states and found that 18-to-29 year old turnout increased by an average of 4 percentage points nationwide over 2014 midterm primaries, and by much more in some battleground states. In Colorado, for example, the youth turnout rate nearly tripled from 4.15% in 2014 to 11.72% in 2018. Still, young voters remained more likely to stay home than other age groups in Colorado, where overall primary turnout was 30%, but their rate of increase outpaced most other age groups.

Other states that showed significant turnout increases among young voters included North Dakota (+6.9 percentage points), Virginia (+3.12), California (+9.3), Oklahoma (+17.9) and Montana (+6).

TargetSmart also followed up on a July study that found voter registration among 18-to-29 year olds had increased in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. The follow-up study found that the bump in youth voter registration wasn’t a postshooting blip, but had been sustained in subsequent months.